May 20, 2010

More delays

Well, suffice to say I've run into another delay. The exported video I mentioned in the previous post didn't turn out well, and Premiere has stopped working due to a weird codec I tried to use. Again, the cartoon itself has been finished for a few days; all these delays are just in trying to get a reasonably high-quality video file.

I'm thinking of buying Adobe Premiere Elements 8, to replace the old 6.0 version I have. It's very affordable, and seems to have all the features I want. It also seems to have more exporting options, which is exactly what I need. Even if my older copy of Premiere hadn't stopped working, I'd pretty much run out of things to try with it. Every video codec I've tried so far has either resulted in horrible quality or an unusably large file (I think Youtube has a 1GB limit, which should be more than enough for such a short cartoon). With the Space Goose cartoons I've used the DivX format, and that seemed to work fine for them, but for some reason when I use DivX on this cartoon, it looks atrocious.

Anyway, sorry that I'm getting into such boring technical detail. The cartoon should be uploaded any day now. It's 5 minutes and 2 seconds long, which I'm relieved about. I was worried it might end up being seven or eight minutes, which is too long for such a simple story.

Last night "Fugitive Goose" was screened at the Revue (thanks for coming, Zoran, Lee, Leah, Bruce and Louise!), and the audience reaction was pretty good, but I kept thinking to myself 'man, this is way too long'. And yet at the same time, I think, now that I can look at it a bit more objectively, the story moves too quickly, and is probably difficult to follow for many people.

Well, this new Fester Fish cartoon probably doesn't have either of those problems. If anything, it's too slow-paced and stupid. But I think the animation's better. You can decide for yourself soon.